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Comment by sildur | Hacker News Reader

I use crypto to do international transfers to Argentina. It's cheaper. I also get a way better rate that way. I try to do it as fast as possible due to the quickly changing rate you mentioned.

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I'm genuinely curious if You find it cheaper including transferring from your currency, to crypto-currency-x, blockchain fee, crypto-currency-x to argentinian peso than transferwise or any of it's competitors? I think they're like $5 and 1.5% to transfer. If you remitted money early this week it probably wiped out any of the savings from the whole year I would guess?

The issue is that when I transfer via international bank transfer I'm subject to pretty steep taxes on the Argentinian bank account. Plus the cost of doing the transfer, which was not cheap (about 40 euro for the sender). Also, most transfer systems convert your currency using the official rate, which is fixed by the government.

On the other side, if I use crypto, the value of my bitcoins (well, my fraction of a bitcoin) is decided not by the government but by the market. That alone makes a difference of between 33% and 60% of the transfer amount.

For example, right now officially an euro is 115 ARS. But non-officially is 184 ARS.

Very interesting, thanks for the response!

Another thing, when I started I used bitcoin, but lately fees are pretty steep so I switched to litecoin which has way lower fees.

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